This question was submitted by Tim who is working on developing a new site around a particular topic – college football. My response and is below – feel free to comment. If you have questions on anything SEO, SEM, Landing Page or Internet Marketing related – drop me an email from the contact page.

Scott,

I am working on creating a college football blog and have been brainstorming various names. My initial idea was to use the keyword “college football” with some other word, or maybe use “Saturday” with another word. However all the feedback I am getting from friends and colleagues is why limit myself to just college (or Saturday) by specifically naming the blog something that suggests only college football, when I could instead name it something related to football (in general) and then have the ability to expand in the future by adding the NFL.

Which do you believe is the better course of action? At this moment the blog (and my interest and expertise) is 100% focused on college football. However I have already received inquiries from others who would like to contribute NFL content.

Thank you for your time,

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the email. You have several considerations here:

1) Putting critical keywords into your blog name will help you with search engine visibility on a lot of levels: inbound links, the power of the works in the domain and the clarity to the engines and visitors about what the blog is about.

2) While it is always tempting to go as broad as possible to get “as much traffic as possible”, it’s really hard to break into multiple keyword/content markets. The more you can focus on a single niche, especially for a new, small site – the faster you will find success.

I think focusing on a blog name that includes college and football in the name is the best approach unless you are ESPN :-).